Night Wars

My review was written in September 1988 after a screening at Selwyn theater on Manhattan's 42nd Street.

"Night Wars" presents an extremely goofy approach to the familiar theme of Vietnam War vets' malaise, treated in supernatural terms. Pic is a standard-issue quickie, more for video than theatrical fans.

Brian O'Connor and Cameron Smith are the vets who have nightmares and hallucinations relating to their leaving behind platoon mate Chet Hood back in Vietnam. Problem is that the nightmares are for real, with wounds inflicted while sleeping still there upon wakeup and even Hood's severed finger materializing for real.

Another war buddy, Dan Haggerty, is now a shrink who rather laughably doesn't believe the heroes' tales of their predicament and gives them a sedative instead of keeping them awake. When machine gun fire from the Great Beyond kills Matthews' pretty wife Jill Foor, Haggerty is a believer.

Silliest scene has O'Connor and Smith putting on camouflage makeup and outfits, arming themselves to the teeth and lying down on a bed together to sleep -they're to do battle with their renegade nemesis Steve Horton, but visually it's campy.

Director David Prior's action scenes are perfunctory, but the acting is okay, except for a very hammy turn by Horton. The supernatural content linking dreams with reality is unconvincing, used in "anything goes" fashion.

Viewers will find it easy to criticize this low-budget, no-name effort found only on the dusty backshelves of a few video stores. It suffers from the flat dialog, so-so acting, haphazard scripting, and awkward pacing so often found in these Grade-Z productions.

And yet there's something about the merger of nightmare and reality in "Night Wars" which gives it an odd, almost haunting quality which softens the edges of all its many faults. Or, putting it another way, considering the vast resources spent on "Pearl Harbor" versus the scant resources spent on this movie, which one is really the more satisfying achievement?

Aside from that blurring between waking and dreaming, the most distinctive feature here comes in the form of two torture scenes occurring in Vietnamese POW camps. In the first scene, Cameron Smith has a red-hot metal rod pressed against his bare chest while he's tied between two posts, and in the second, Brian O'Connor -- tied between two trees -- has strips of barb-wire tightened around his naked torso. Unlike many Hollywood movies in which the hero suffers stoically, these two men scream with open-mouthed agony. (You can even count the fillings in Cameron Smith's teeth.) And unlike many Hollywood heroes, these two men don't have perfectly-chiseled physiques. (O'Connor especially shows signs of middle-aged flab.) The result is unnerving because the torture seems to be inflicted on real men rather than movie actors.

Top-billed Dan Haggerty has little to do in his part and Steve Horton overdoes the wild-eyed look as the sadistic villain, but Jill Foor invokes suitable sympathy as Brian O'Connor's bewildered wife. As for the two tormented ex-POWs, O'Connor is earnest and almost even appealing and Cameron Smith has the born-to-be-tortured look which is just right for this part.

Vietnam veterans Trent Matthews (Brian Edward O'Connor, a poor man's Robert Ginty) and Jim Lowery (Cameron Smith) are suffering from recurring dreams about the war; as they sleep, they battle the Vietcong in an attempt to rescue fellow soldier Johnny (Chet Hood), who they had to leave behind during their escape from a prisoner-of-war camp nine years earlier. Also haunting their nightmares is sadistic traitor McGregor (Steve Horton, overacting wildly), who wants to continue with his torture of the men.

Waking to find that injuries sustained in their dreams leave real marks on their bodies, Trent and Jim realise that they must confront their fears or die. Arming themselves to the teeth, they enter their dreams to make one last ditch effort to find Johnny and drag him into reality.

Borrowing heavily from A Nightmare on Elm Street, but with a Vietnam war film twist, Night Wars is wholly unoriginal late-'80s straight-to-video nonsense that suffers from a serious lack of logic. Now I know what you're thinking - dreams don't have to make sense - but the film needs to adhere to a few rules for it to work.

Case in point: taking weapons into the dreams. When Trent and Jim fall asleep, they do so with loaded firearms in their hands, which they fire in reality whenever they do so in their dream. In their final rescue attempt, they also lob around a fair few grenades, but conveniently fail to throw a single real grenade in the room in which they are asleep. Consistency be damned!

The film is also unclear about how Johnny and McGregor are projecting themselves into Trent and Jim's dreams. There is no suggestion that they are dead. Is it astral projection? If so, how did they learn to pull off this trick? At one point, McGregor even attacks Trent's wife as she sleeps, with no explanation about how he manages this. And are Trent and Jim astrally projecting themselves as they snooze, their spirits manifesting in Vietnam? None of it makes a lick of sense.

I will give props for the number of bloody squibs used in the shootouts - hence my generous rating of 3/10 - but there are better things you could be doing with your time.

N.B. Despite getting top billing, Dan Haggerty only has a supporting role as concerned doctor Mike Campbell.

Oh, dear, this one is awful! I once bet a Navy Chief Petty Officer, a Marine Gunnery Sergeant, and a couple of enlisted guys a case of beer if they could get through it without "losing it," and I let them decide for themselves what "losing it" meant. I won the beer.

One learns a number of interesting things about infantry combat in this little retcher - for one thing, the Viet Cong ought to sue the makers for defamation (it was shot in Mexico, and most of the bad guys are remarkably un-Asian types who the credits reveal have names ending in "ez.") Let's start with the a new martial arts technique - get your opponent face-down and pull his hair back and voila! his neck breaks. Evidently that's what my little sister was after lo those many years ago...

The idea, of course, is a post-traumatic-syndrome exploitation flick. One views a patrol of good guys, evidently Woodstock castoffs, stumbling through the Vietnamese jungles falling over one another - "combat separation" here evidently refers to "get 12 guys into the camera's viewfinder simultaneously." One shot down the trail would have shish-kebab'd these goofs out of their misery. And what misery it was...

Here we have the hero, in the middle of a desperate firefight, ducking behind a tree and for some reason popping the magazine out from his .45 - perhaps to see how many "bullets" were left - I use the term "bullets" advisedly since the camera closeup reveals, in all its brassy glory, the crimped end of a blank cartridge. Appalling.

The climax involves our heroes stuffing a cheap hotel room with enough ordnance to sink an aircraft carrier, then, as do all who are minutes away from furious mortal combat, falling asleep. I shall leave the denouement for those stubborn enough to last that far...

Three thumbs-down, but a decent effort for the truly masochistic.

(1988) Night Wars WAR/ SUPERNATURAL

Straight-to-rental flick that is co-written and directed by David A. Prior, which is like a Freddy Krueger-like war movie with two Nam friends by the names of Trent (Brian Edward O'Connor) and Jim (Cameron Smith) become telepathically linked to one another after figuring out that an old war vet is still alive at an POW Vietnam camp assumed to be dead. But, as a result of many spontaneous dream sequences which the only thing they dream about is still being in Vietnam again, a double crossing Vietnam war soldier by the name of McGregor (Steve Horton) keeps appearing in there so-called dreams, just so he can continue his torture tactics. And upon the two stars waking up again, they would even have the scars where they were tortured too without fully understanding how they got them in the first place, except to remember that they got them as a result of a dream that is similar to the 'A Nightmare On Elm Street' movies. What's kind of ludicrous is the fact that viewers are never shown how they ended up getting these dreams in the first place. I mean, was there some strange ritual ever practiced on them before they manage to escape, and then settle back to the States? And the answer is no. The other ludicrous thing is the fact that the two main stars never had to spend money on a plane ticket back to Vietnam to save the friend they left behind because they can do that while they're sleeping, and firing their weapons at the same time. The only thing that's saving this film from being a complete disaster is the fact that there's an unexpected twist that occurred at the end, and can give viewers something to think about besides tolerating the awful second rate performances. Dan Haggerty also stars who's best known for playing 'Grizzly Adams' as Mike Campbell as Trent's doctor and shrink.